HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know

Oof, this hits home.

Out of college I worked for a large company that's well-known for hiring lots of folks straight out of undergrad with high salaries and a demand of high hours.

Despite an almost cultlike devotion to meritocracy and micro-feedback, the "merits" only mattered if it was in furtherance of already established norms of success.

In a large company like that, deviation wasn't viewed as having a unique skillset, it was viewed as making it harder for other people around you to fit their work into a unique landscape that featured you.

If you feel like your company treats you this way, can I recommend a startup? When no one knows whether the process you're following today is the "right" process, like while a startup is achieving product-market fit, then there's lots of room for unique thinkers.

This article raises a lot of important considerations about how large workplaces operate and what to expect from them as a line level employee.

I think it's a reasonable takeaway for newer people to understand that HR in a big organization is there because it "adds value" to the organization mainly by protecting it from a wide range of potential legal liabilities.

That's not to say that HR isn't ever useful to line level employees in specific workplace situations. I've found them to be responsive to workplace health and safety things, office ergonomics basically, when that potentially affects your health on the job.

But it seems fair to observe that "human resources" is already a specialization that, as its very name indicates, tends to construe the human beings who work there as … need I even finish my point?

Illuminating!

Nice ending “reasonable exchanges only happen with reasonable people”

The problem starts with the name, humans are not resources. Stones. metals and food are resources. It's a slave term to see people as resources. I will never contract myself to those companies and people.

> If you feel like your company treats you this way, can I recommend a startup?

Having worked in both startups and large corporate companies, I feel they're just on the opposite side of the spectrum. In big corps there are established processes that are almost impossible to change, in startups the processes are changed daily, which can be equally annoying.

Jumping to a startup because you don't like the big corp style is a major change, the same goes for the other way around. Maybe go for a smaller, but already established company.